In the lane below my window, metal glints in the moonlight.
Shoving open the casement I call down in a loud whisper, “Mr. Ambrose?”
Llamrei takes a few steps forward, carrying his rider nearer the window. “Good evening, Miss Kirk,” he says in a low voice that sends a shiver through me.
He is dressed for travel, in a hat and warm cloak, leather bags tied behind his saddle.
“Are you going somewhere, sir?” I ask. I pray the Gordons are abed.
“I am. To Edinburgh, to resume my life,” he says wryly.
I swallow against a growing tightness in my throat. “What shall you do there?”
“Return to the university.” He glances around at the deserted lane. “If they’ll have me.”
“I go there in two days myself, to meet Mr. Lang,” I blurt, sounding much like a schoolgirl to my own ears. “To Edinburgh, that is.”
“Ah,” he says politely. “Very good.”
“I thought I might…” He studies me expectantly, and I falter. “That is to say…I wondered if I might call?”
“Miss Kirk.”
I pause to let him continue.
“I must apologize to you. I was…I felt so sure of my purpose. Even now I feel the weight of ages bearing down on me, and I…” He studies me a moment and then shakes his head. “Suffice it to say that at some point my judgment became clouded. My burden is mine to bear, and what I did to you is un—”
“Please don’t,” I interrupt, my voice breaking. “I am well and whole.” More whole in fact than I remember ever feeling, though my heart is aching in an unfamiliar way.
“Truly?”
“Truly. I…I had hoped that we might speak again. I’ve thought about all you said—”
“Och, do not remind me of it.”
“Of course, I’m sorry.” I hesitate, unsure how to continue. Unsure whether he wants me to. Finally, I gather courage and add, “It’s only that I believe you are an unusual and gifted person. I should like to know you better.” My face flushes at the recent memories that rise to mind. “Perhaps in Edinburgh we might…”
He observes my confusion, and I catch the gleam of white teeth. It is the first time since our meeting beside the fairy pool that I’ve seen him smile. It lights his face in a way that raises a swell of longing.
“Shall I accompany you to Kyle of Lochalsh?” he asks. “We could cross over together.”
“You would take me?”
“If you like.”
“Please wait.”
Like a young woman embarking on an elopement, I fly around my bedchamber gathering my things. I don’t even bother to dress, only cover my nightdress with my overcoat. I drop my small bag out the window, and he catches and secures it with the others.
After counting out what I owe the Gordons, and scribbling a hasty note thanking them for their many kindnesses while apologizing for my strange and sudden departure, I return to the window.
I stare at him dumbly, wondering how I’m to go down to him.
“There’s an old piece of trellis still attached to the house,” he says. “When you reach the end, let go and I’ll catch you.”
I bend and study the trellis, cracked and in some places covered with moss. Then I rise and eye him with apprehension.
“It’s not far,” he says with a chuckle. “But I’ll station myself underneath and catch you if you fall.”
Drawing a deep breath, I swing a leg over the sill and find the upper rail of the trellis with my boot. I test my weight on it, and when it holds, I swing my other leg out. There are only a few steps, and all goes well until the last rail—which breaks with a crisp snap.
I give a startled yelp, but the gentleman is true to his word. Gravity carries me all the way to Llamrei’s back, but Ambrose’s arms guide and soften my landing. We find ourselves face-to-face, my legs spread over the outsides of his.
“Hello, Miss Kirk,” he murmurs.
“Hello, Mr. Ambrose,” I breathe.
My nightdress having hiked up to my hips in the fall, I feel his hands moving up my bare thighs. I shiver against him, and I can feel his cock engorging where it’s pressed between my open legs.
I’m overtaken by a sudden need to feel that wholeness again, and I reach for the button of his trousers.
He raises a dark eyebrow. “You are…formidable, Miss Kirk. I believe I’ve warned you about that sort of thing?”
“I find myself with a will to disobey,” I whisper.
He gasps as my fingers close over his cock. Suddenly his hands are at my waist, lifting me, and then I’m sliding down over him with a moan of satisfaction. I lift my feet to the backs of his legs, using them for leverage to ride him. Llamrei holds steady beneath us.
The close, hard grinding is too much for both of us. His hand comes to my breast, squeezing, and he bends and thrusts his tongue into my mouth. I raise myself until just the tip of his member remains inside, and then I let go, sinking all the way to his belly as we muffle our cries against each other.
When my heartbeat and breathing have slowed, I whisper, “What about the curse?”
He nudges Llamrei forward, and the kelpie sets out at a gentle walk that jogs our bodies deliciously against each other. His arms circle around, steadying me. “We are not those people,” he says. “We make our own fate.”
He says this with conviction, but I am not sure that I believe him. I think perhaps that he has decided to face whatever life has in store, as we all must.
For myself, I believe the curse was broken the moment I fled from him and he decided to let me go.
Our past has no power to curse us unless we hold it to our breast.
5
Willa and the Wisp
NEW BAYOU—NEW ORLEANS THAT WAS
The Price of Light
I’ve got the tightest little pirogue in the township of Claudette. Anywhere in New Bayou you’ve a mind to go, I’ll get you there.
Business is good since Eli Barton’s ugly old shell caught fire outside Toady’s Tavern. And despite what folk say, I didn’t have a damn thing to do with that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t keep an eye toward expansion when opportunity walks up and asks me to dance.
That’s why me and Cherry—that’s my ride—are poling through the swamp after dark, going against nine kinds of better judgment, to meet a crazy old hermit woman who says she’s got a solution to my light problem. A lantern in a boat’s a hazard—just ask Eli. We’ve got to have them though. It’s the only way to keep the creepers at bay when you transport between townships. And transporting between townships—especially after dark, when the unlicensed ’shine runners operate—is the only real way to catch enough coin to keep yourself fed.
A creeper can’t stand the light. But they can smell blood, and the skin all up and down my arms pricks knowing they’re out there, maybe as little as six feet from my pirogue, waiting for the oil in my lanterns to burn down. My gaze flicks to the fluid levels and then back to the still, black water. My next pole-stroke disturbs a nest of juvenile gators, and the moonlight flashes over pearly white bellies as they wriggle on the surface. They squirm away, their chirpy distress calls blending into the nighttime music of the swamp.
I’m not old enough to remember a time when gators were the scariest things in the swamp.
Mama says it’s no kind of life for a slip of a girl like me, and I’d do better to marry Eli’s brother Luke, who’s asked at least three times now and shows no sign of stopping.
I stretched the truth earlier when I said I didn’t make enough coin to feed myself. I do, and then some. But Mama lost her sight two years ago, and I’ve got three little brothers. I’m the only one of us old enough or strong enough to earn, and I pay half my coin to our landlord’s daughter so she’ll look after the boys.
Papa poled a pirogue too. He was a gator man, but it was the creepers that got him. Mama says if the same thing happens to me she’ll pole out and ask them to take her too. With Mama and me gone, someone
would take in the twins for sure, because they’re the cutest pair of bouncy clowns you ever saw, but poor little Micah would be left to starve. He talks to people who aren’t there, and Claudette folk say he’s tainted. Touched by the sickness that created the creepers.
But folk talk when they shouldn’t. Nobody knows where the creepers came from. And sweet Micah is no more one of them than I am. There was once a great, dry city right under where we live now. Sometimes we find pieces of it in the swamp. Lots of folk died when that city flooded for the last time. I’d almost bet my ride that Micah is talking to some of those folk. Ones who can’t let go of the place. It’s a thing the two of us have in common. They mostly leave you alone if you ignore them.
But restless souls are one thing, and creepers are another.
Maud O’Keefe has a big house on stilts deep in the swamp. She makes her living peddling cures and potions to the people of New Bayou, and I get her business because she trusts me to deliver the goods and bring back all her coin. Only this trip to Maud’s is different. For the last two years, she’s had her eye on a yellow-diamond brooch I use to fasten a butter-colored head wrap around my inky ringlets. It was Mama’s, and I’ve a mind to hang on to it until we bump up against some deep desperation. Which is why it’s always about my person and not in some drawer for the twins to pilfer. But Maud says she’s got something she thinks will convince me to part with it. Something that will make it safer for me to travel through the swamp at night.
The house is lit up like Christmas both inside and out—candles in every window, and maybe a hundred strings of fairy lights draped over walkways and twined around railings. Maud says her time may be coming, but she’ll be damned if she’ll die at the hands of a creeper. I call it overkill, since fueling that generator must be costing her a fortune.
I pole up to the dock, and Maud comes out to meet me. I climb out of the pirogue, leaving my lanterns behind because it’s bright as midday with all the lights.
“Well, Miss Willa,” she greets me. Her honey-sweet voice is seasoned by a funny bit of accent that Mama says is Irish. “Glad you’ve made it safe and sound.”
Her crazy patchwork dress pools at her feet, snowy white dreadlocks brushing the dock, as she bends and lifts a crate.
“I’ll get that, Maud. You’ll hurt your back.”
“Thank you, child,” she replies, surrendering the crate.
I hoist it and tuck it into the pirogue.
“Usual cures for the usual customers,” she murmurs. “Excepting this, of course.”
She hands me an empty mason jar. I raise it toward the light, squinting at its lack of contents. “What’s this?”
“To light your way.”
I raise my eyebrows. “But there’s nothing in it.”
“Oh, there is. Give it a shake.”
I shake the jar, and it’s like striking a match. Yellow light flares, and I almost drop the jar.
“Careful, child,” warns Maud. “If you break it, it’ll get out.”
The flare steadies to a glow that’s strong enough to cast light even in these bright conditions.
“What will get out?” I ask, mesmerized by the strange thing. The glass warms under my fingers.
“It’s a wisp,” she replies, blue eyes twinkling. “From the old country.”
“A wisp?”
“A sort of fairy creature. That light has lasted for two centuries—and will for centuries more—so long as you never open or break the jar.”
I gape at her. With that fuzzy white mane of hers, her gap-toothed grin, and the mischievous gleam in her crinkly old eyes, she looks exactly like what most folks say she is—a half-crazy swamp hag. There’s been sense enough in everything she’s ever said to me, until now.
Again I squint into the jar. “I still don’t see anything, Maud.”
“No, and you won’t. But it’s in there. Shake it again.”
I do, and the light goes out.
“Now,” she continues, “you use that light in the swamp and you won’t need another.”
She takes it from me and slips it into a crocheted bag. One specially made for it, I gather from the snug way it fits and the large openings left to allow the light to pass through.
She gives it back to me and holds out her hand, palm up. “I believe we had a bargain.”
Her gaze darts to the usual resting place of the diamond brooch. But since this is exactly the reason I’ve come tonight, I’ve already got a cheap glass replacement. I reach into a pocket and draw out the original, which was given to Mama by her grandmother, and I hold it in my palm. I don’t waver. I’m not sentimental, and if this wisp thing does as advertised, it’s worth the brooch and more. But if folk had coin to spend on such things, it’d sell for enough to feed my family for years, so I stand a moment turning it this way and that, watching it sparkle under the fairy lights.
Mama gave it to me when her poor eyes could no longer see its yellow light, in case it might help our family someday. Expanding my business is the best way I know to do that. It’s a stroke of luck, really, that old Maud’s able to make me a practical trade for it. She won’t say what she intends to do with it, only that it’ll keep her safe from the creepers until she shuffles off from natural causes.
Finally I hand it over, and Maud winks at me and slips it into one of the folds of her tentlike dress.
“What if this thing stops working?” I ask, lifting the bag’s strap over my head and resting it securely across my body.
“You do as I told you, and it won’t.” Gaze dropping to where the mason jar dangles in front of one hip, she adds, “It’s a precious thing and you’ll want to guard it, of course. But don’t keep it so close to you all the time.”
I frown and glance down at the jar. “Why? Is it dangerous?”
Maud shakes her head. “No, no, child. I’ve had it my whole life and it’s never brought me harm. Just don’t be cuddling up with it like you did with that brooch. I’ve told you before, you have a shiny kind of energy.”
She has. She said it’s why the restless dead are drawn to me. “What does that matter?”
“It may give you a kind of kinship with the thing,” she says in a halting way, like she hasn’t thought of it before. Finally, she shakes her head. “Just don’t sleep with it under your pillow. But do find a safe hiding place for when you don’t need it. Someplace the wee ones won’t disturb it.”
I adjust the strap with my hand and settle the jar back against my hip, where I intend for it to stay. There’s no place I’d feel safe leaving it, not even my tree house.
But I nod anyway, and I step back down into Cherry. I give the jar a shake and raise my pole, and Maud gives me another of those strange, half-expectant, half-amused smiles. My head tells me I’ve made the right decision, but some other part of me knows that smile is for me. Maud’s had some kind of presentiment, and it’s no use asking, because she never tells. You might argue that if she’s smiling, it can’t be anything too awful.
But I’ve seen Maud smile at things no regular folk would.
The Restless Dead
I go home after that, because I’ve got goods to deliver. Once I’ve collected Maud’s coin, I head back into the swamp. But I don’t go straight to Maud. I haven’t slept in two days, and with the twins underfoot at home, the only place I can relax in the daytime is my tree house.
It’s a tumbledown sort of shack that someone saw fit to build fifteen feet above water level in a knot of cypress trees. I get up by a rope ladder I made myself after the first time I glimpsed the place on a ’shine run. I can pull up the rope to keep the creepers out, but mostly I use the tree house in daylight hours. I catch up on sleep, or sometimes just swing in the porch hammock, listening to the birds and frogs.
I haven’t used the tree house much of late because I’m no longer alone there. But right now I’m tired enough to start making mistakes, and mistakes can be fatal in the swamp. Just ask my papa.
Gripping my knife between my teeth, I
climb the rope, and I make my inspection first thing. Seeing as there’s only one room, it doesn’t take long. I’ve yet to see a creeper climb a tree, nor stir in daylight, but I can’t afford to take things like that for granted. Coast is clear, so I pull up the ladder, pour a shot of ’shine to guarantee undisturbed sleep, and flop into the hammock.
The ’shine comes close to making me gag, but I manage to keep it down. I already feel myself sinking toward oblivion, but my gaze falls on the mason jar, which rests just inside my hip bone.
I think about what Maud said about keeping it too close. And I think about what Micah said the moment I walked in our front door: “He wants out.” The words troubled me some, though I couldn’t imagine what he meant. Who wants out? The thing responsible for the light? I can’t take the jar home again—Micah can be trusted to follow his heart, for better or for worse.
With one foot resting against the porch railing, I rock the hammock back and forth. The air is so wet and heavy the swinging motion fails to even stir a breeze. Tiny beads of sweat bring a sheen to my dark skin, and droplets collect and trickle down under my arms and between my breasts. The frog- and birdsong is soothing as any lullaby, and before long I’m dozing.
—
Twilight is coming on when I wake. The flesh of my abdomen feels strangely warm, and I glance down. The lantern still rests between my hips, and I see the reason for the warmth: the jar is glowing a vivid orange, like logs at the bottom of a fire.
The air has cooled a little with the sinking of the sun, and I feel no need to disturb the jar from its resting place. It’s an intriguing sort of warmth. The kind that makes me lift my pelvis slightly, feeling the jar’s weight shift as it rolls between the sharp blades of my hip bones, grazing the low mound at the base of my belly along the way.
“It’s been a while, sugar.”
The close voice comes as such a shock I forget to ignore it. My gaze jumps to the woman approaching the hammock. Or rather the ghost of what was once a woman. Despite the fact that she’s long dead, my body knows her, and responds whether I like it or not. It doesn’t help that she’s dressed like the high-class whore she once was—sheer black lace corset, garters with fishnets, and impossibly high stilettos. Her makeup is dark, like her perfectly arranged hair, her flesh pale and flawless as the stone statue of Venus on Maud’s veranda. She’s not a fleshy type, though. Long-limbed like me, with easy, graceful movements. She’s got the most beautiful painted pout I’ve ever seen.
Before She Wakes: Forbidden Fairy Tales Page 16
